Help me comply with licenses

[ZeroEkkusu]

Gm, frens,

Are there some common ways of complying with the standardized open source licenses among devs, like, where to put license files, giving credits, etc?

I did find Choose a License and The Legal Side of Open Source helpful, but still have questions.

Here's my aave_brownie_py repo.
I chose the MIT license and added my copyright.

1. Let's start from the dependencies

aave/protocol-v2 is AGPL-3.0

These files are not in my repo, but they do get fetched (outside the project dir) when compiling. The LICENSE file is fetched, as well.
Q1.1 - Do I need to add anything to my repo, then?

However, I do have ILendingPool.sol and IProtocolDataProvider.sol inside my interfaces directory, both of which are licensed under AGLP-3.0.
Q1.2 - Should I put a AGPL-3.0 license file in there?
Q1.3 - There's no copyright notice in these files, but there is one in Aave's LICENSE. That's it, right, where should I put it?

2. Other interfaces

AggregatorV3Interface.sol is MIT - the same as my repo. I already have the license in my root dir.
Q2 - What should I do here? (The copyright notice situation is the same as above with Aave)

3. PatrickAlphaC/aave_brownie_py

Btw, Patrick did not provide any licenses copies / copyright notices besides the repo's LICENSE.
Patrick's repo is MIT licensed. My repo is based on this repo and is heavily modified.
Q3 - How should I credit Patrick?

4. I have a few more questions but that's it for now

[cromewar]

@PatrickAlphaC could you give us a hand o this one?

[PatrickAlphaC]

Wow, totally missed this. I'm so sorry!

[ZeroEkkusu]

@cromewar delete the discussion, please
The matter is more complicated then I thought

[cromewar]

I was doing research on this actually, but didn't fin anything reliable just that each contract file should be treated as independent with it's own license, so you could multiple licenses on your project and each file is ruled by that specific one.

[ZeroEkkusu]

Okay, here's the commit I've made. TL;DR is down there👇

Of course, I did some research, too, and, as @cromewar said, the information isn't very concrete. On top of that, this is mostly legal stuff. However, two things are clear:

• Some licenses are incompatible with one another

If license A says extended programs must be under license A, and license B says extended programs must be under license B, they have an irreconcilable disagreement.

• Copyleft licenses, such as AGPLv3, are stricter than permissive licenses, such as MIT
  

So, here's what I've done:

• Wherever I copied or modified Patrick's code, I added, respectively:

Copied from PatrickAlphaC/aave_brownie_py (https://github.com/PatrickAlphaC/aave_brownie_py). See NOTICE.md.

Modified from PatrickAlphaC/aave_brownie_py (https://github.com/PatrickAlphaC/aave_brownie_py). See NOTICE.md.

You can see examples here.

• Then, I made NOTICE.md, with a copy of Patrick's aave_brownie_py license inside, where I stated that the project is based on his (and mentioned it in the README.md, as well)
• I isolated the Chainlink and Aave interfaces inside dedicated directories together with their LICENSEs
• Finally, I relicensed my repo to AGPLv3 because (I think - see the graphic above) using the MIT license is not an option here, i.e. MIT --> AGLPv3 ✔️ MIT <-- AGLPv3 ❌ because my Aave dependency is AGLPv3, and it's viral

[n4n0b1t3]

Wow, that is very thorough! I was contemplating this topic recently too. In many cases, it is not even necessary to have a written copyright notice in documents. GitHub is a good way to prove, that at one point someone came up with something. However, I believe that time to market is the most important thing and getting a user base. When anyone has the time and means to copy your idea, there is little you can do against it, unless you have the money to hire lawyers and as we have seen with Zuck, even this doesn't always work.

[ZeroEkkusu]

Those are good points @n4n0b1t3. I'd add marketing to those. In the world when most can code and anyone can fork, you need to set your self apart.

As for the licenses (setting the business aspects aside), you have to comply with terms and conditions.

My approach with Copied from... would not cut it. The MIT license requires those big headers whenever you use someone's code, which is inconvinent.

Some of those licences are meant to prevent use in closed source or require special permissions (think $$$).

One good approach is to license the repo under the MIT/Apache dual license - to let the user choose which one to use. The MIT requires headers and is compatible with AGLPv3, while the Apache does not require the headers but also is not compatible with AGPLv3.

I used it for this library: 🧪 Optimizooor's Lab.

[PatrickAlphaC]

This is awesome!! So sorry I totally missed this discussion... Looks like yall found a solution here. :)

Licenses are stuff I've shyed away from and just made everything MIT so people can use whatever.

Thanks for looking to credit the work!

[n4n0b1t3]

@ZeroEkkusu I am impressed, your projects have an aesthetic quality that is hard to find. Would it be OK if we connect on LinkedIn?

[ZeroEkkusu]

whats linkedin?

(I'm not on LinkedIn)